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usual path and try to stay somewhat dry.
    Up the small staircase, across the street, across the parking lot... blah blah blah... STOP!
    No line for coffee – no beggars either. The street in front of the coffee shop is empty.
    Feeling like a small boy who has had his head turned by a parent wishing them to take a new direction, I twist my view slowly around so that I can see the building where I thought I saw a small boy shouting yesterday.
    The tall brick building is gone, but the church is back.

Chapter Seven – The Basement of the Church
    Jonah
    Ruben had discovered a bio-technology that allows most insects and rodents to be mass re-produced in the span of several minutes. With the combination of very simple gene therapy, hormone injections and a special diet, a pair of rats could produce thousands of offspring who themselves would mature extremely rapidly, albeit unable to mate themselves. Likewise, a queen bee, cockroach, earwig, grasshopper or several other varieties of insects and rodents could be given a similar treatment that would seem to unlock a hidden biological potentiate in them.
    I remember the day that he told me what it was. It comes to me now, as I look at that church across the street. I had just managed to get the kids to bed and was just trying to settle down myself for a few quiet moments with Rachel before we passed out ourselves.
    The phone rang and Rachel picked it up. It was Ruben, she could tell from the call display, and she handed me the phone without stopping on her way up the stairs. I couldn’t tell if she rolled her eyes or not, but she certainly had cause to, since my discussions with Ruben were rarely short.
    This one had been short – too short for a last conversation with a brother.
    “Jonah,” he said to me. “I can’t talk long. Go check your email right now and then unplug your Ethernet cable.”
    “Huh?”
    “Just do it now, you’ll know why soon.”
    “What are you talking about?” I asked him, wondering whether I should be as worried as I felt I was becoming.”
    Silence – an emptiness where there should have been a carrier signal.
    And that was my last conversation with Ruben. Many hours and days would pass before I got the nerve to plug that cable back in.
    I released the contents of my brother’s research into a public forum on genetic animal pharmacology the day after I wrote the article, meant for a non-technical audience, on the general outline of the research and its conclusions based on practical tests. The article attributed all research credits to my brother, as they should have, and even though I had been unscrupulously careful in my wording, I had always known the risks of what I was doing.
    Therefore, it is my fault , I think to myself, as I walk slowly across the street, that the world has learned how to create a plague.
    …
    My emptiness grows deeper as I tug on the locked church doors. Soaking wet, I wonder whether the rain on my face is mingled with long-overdue tears from the death of my brother. I circle the building back to the alley I had exited yesterday in my escape from the rooftop.
    A find the back door – this one is open – so I step inside to see whether Michael and his friend Gabe are for real or just in my imagination.
    The stairs are carpeted and smell somewhat mouldy. It is a good sort of a smell that I attribute to churches which don’t open their back doors often enough to remember to lock them. I climb the steps and enter a room just off the main sanctuary through a narrow doorway in the corner. The lighting is dim, provided only by several stained bubble-glazed windows.
    I move across the small antechamber and walk several steps to stand in the center aisle, wondering whether I ought to be here alone. Through the slanted roof I can hear the spatter and drizzle of raindrops.
    “Hello?” I call out. “Is anybody here?”
    No sound except for the rain.
    “Hello-oh!” Nothing.
    I turn to face the front of the church. There is